The competition is on: put your name to the highscore list!

So, we have had the online highscore list going on in DPAQ from the start. Already there are people from all over the world: from over 15 countries in Europe, North-America, South-America and Africa. Check out the situation from the game (global highscores) or from the highscores-website.

Milan from Germany leads with amazing 2848 points. Also Weissheim from Great Britain and Ulf from Germany have managed to reach 2500 points, which is truly a top score. Nine other players have topped 2000 points; vmfireball from Hungary, Akis from Greece, Soren Mogensen from Denmark, Solitair from Germany, Ciouo from Sweden, jeppe from Denmark, speed king from Norway, nikow from Finland and LordHypnos from The Netherlands.

Generally, over 2000 points seem to require 27 correct answers from the 30 available. However, vmfireball managed to get over 2k with only 25 correct, which is because he or she was able to click on the correct answer so fast. Also Ciouo did an excellent 2300 points with just 26 correct - very fast answering! At the same time Akis had to settle for 2227 points, even though he/she answered 29/30 correct. You may think this is unfair, but it really isn't. Everyone can use e.g. Google or their own record collection to check out the correct answers and in this way, secure 30/30. But the game doesn't reward the player from this activity! You actually need to know the answers when the game asks the questions, and when you know them, you can also answer fast and get more points. Of course checking Google is allowed and one can learn things, and then try to achieve a better score next time - this is even recommended. Listen more DP music, learn all kind of information about it, get a better score in the game - simple! But not during one game: you don't have time to find out the facts, you must already know them. Thus, this quiz measures DP-knowledge - not internet browsing capabilities like many other general quizzes.

There is still much room in the list, so go and put your name up there if you still haven't. The game shows the top-100, but the website (link above) has rooms for thousands of players.

Reactions from the first 5 days

The first days online have been pretty active for DPAQ. Generally, the players found it quite fun and entertaining to play (as our poll here seems to indicate as well), and some even got hooked in its simple but addictive gameplay- great! =)

Here's some of the feedback from DPAQ-players:

"This was real fun!"
"Cool! Just playing it, great work! Good fun!"
"Great!"
"All in all it's a really fine game."
"It's good fun and I'll keep on trying to break my current record!"
"Phew, I finally managed to get ahead of Nikow in the hi score list - - I think I'm getting addicted."
"I don't wanna know how many hours I played this game today."
"Thanks for this nice game!"
"Great quiz."

The critic and suggestions for improvement have been focusing around the scoring system, replayability of the quiz, the role of luck in the game, loading times of the sound clips, question formulation and about what exactly is a correct answer in some special cases.

For some players it has been a bit of a barrier to dowload the game and extract the zip file, but hopefully these technical obstacles wouldn't be too big. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask about them here.

There have been some 90 scores submitted into the global hi-score list, which is viewable from the game and also from this website. Today I cleaned it up a bit, so that for some players who have like dozen of scores there, only the best ones were kept. Anyway, don't hesitate to submit as many results as you like!

* * The first public version is out! * *

Like I promised couple of days ago, the first public version is now downloadable. It's fully functioning, even though some of the clips may not yet play.

So, how to play? - very easily:

1. Download the quiz (7 Mb)
2. Extract it (normal zip file)
3. Double click the DP icon

Then you're in; the game starts. Press the "START" button and the quiz will soon begin! Easy, huh?

Answer to 30 questions and submit your score to the online highscore board, so that other players can see your result and try to beat it. That's the game. Notice that submitting is possible only in the Main game mode.

Then, I would like to ask a favour. When you've downloaded the quiz and played it, could you please give a short comment whether it worked or not and what did you think about it. You can comment by clicking the little comment link right below this post.

This first version is the base to develop the quiz further, correct mistakes, add features, add new tracks and so on. The competition for the best DP experts is also about to begin, so keep an eye on this site...! =)

Trailer 1

A picture tells more than 1000 words, right? How about a video, then? Here's your first chance to take a look at the upcoming DPAQ in (99 %) action! It's a little "trailer" I made for it which showcases the main features of the game and demonstrates how easy it's to play - but still so hard to master!

Click on the play-button to watch the clip. It's also available at YouTube.





There is a possibility that I will put the 1st version of the quiz available here already in Friday or Saturday, so stay tuned!

...yet another new screenshot

Let's take a closer look at this preview picture of the DPAQ (click to enlarge):



It's about the scoring/ranking system used in the quiz. In addition to the online highscore board (not shown here), there are different rankings for all the game modes (Main Mode, The 70's, Mark II, The Morse Era and Piece Of Cake). These are "offline" rankings, meaning that they are local for each computer separately. So, kind of personal best rankings and viewable only to you (unlike the online scores which can be viewed by all the players in the web).

The higher the total score you'll get in all the game modes, the better your total ranking is. It begins from "Total newbie" and ends to something much more flattering...let's see what sort of a ranking you will achieve in it... ;)

Some new preview pictures!

Here are some new pictures from DPAQ. As you can see, there is already a lot that has been done, so the quiz will see daylight quite soon. It's currently totally playable, but I still need to do a lot of testing, polishing up and adding some minor features into it, before the first public version can be released.

Click on the pictures to view a real-size version.

First, when a new game has been started, the game mode must be selected.
The main mode has all the songs and all the questions, so it's the most challenging one.

The most basic question: which song is playing. It's usually quite
easy, but sometimes the sound clip may not be exactly the clearest possible.

Yay, I got that one correct! The quiz rewarded my effort with +57 points.
This means that it took some time for me to figure out the answer because I didn't get more points.

The lyric questions are one of the most interesting question types.
You must recognize the song and the connect a short phrase of lyrics to it.

Sometimes the quiz can really get challenging! To remember what was
the song's track number in the original album is one of those more difficult questions.

When all the questions have been completed, the game will announce the final score
and the player has a possibility to enter his or her name and nationality and
submit the final score into an online highscore list of all the DP fans wordwide!

More pictures coming later. I'll probably also make a short instruction video about the quiz to YouTube, just to show how easy it is to play. Stay tuned. =)

First version is getting closer...

In other words; the development has progressed nicely!

I have now confirmed the feature set for the first version. It looks like as follows:

• Sound clips of 236 Deep Purple tracks recorded in 1968-2005
• A total of 3,304 different questions about these songs
• 5 different game modes or question sets to choose from
• Online highscore list

So it looks pretty extensive and that's what it also is. I'm sure many of you have played "typical" music/dp quiz games before, but this is in a whole another category! You'll get actual music, you'll get thousands of possible questions, you'll get replayability and you'll get a way to compete with other players of the quiz.

I'm aiming to get the first public version released in the beginning of October.

Preliminary test raport & the scoring system

Today I made the first actual test about how the quiz works...and it was a success! Although there is still a lot to do, the basic functions of the game seemed to work nicely. I have implemented two game modes so far: the Main mode which has currently around 220 DP songs and questions about them, and The Morse Era mode which asks questions only about the songs recorded during 1996-2005. I also played it a while, the first song happened to be '69 and the question was simply "which song is playing". Well, managed to get some 80 points from it, so it was pretty easy. But there really are some more difficult questions in the quiz as well, like "where was '69 recorded?" - that already requires some serious DP-knowledge! Moreover, some of the sound samples are really hard to recognize, because they may not be from the chorus section, or there may not be any singing in them, for instance. That makes things more interesting!

The scoring, by the way, is based on time. So the faster you'll give the correct answer, the more points you will get. Perfect answer (lightspeed fast correct answer) is worth of 100 points. 90 points is a top score, 80 is a good one, 60 an average and so on. The minimum possible score for a single correct answer is 10 points - that's what you'll get for a correct answer unregardless of how long you must think before answering. If you answer incorrectly, your score will be substracted by 50 points. These rules make it possible to have a quiz, where one can't just open up Google and find out the answers - you'll need to know them if you want to have a top score. But of course using Google or any other site is allowed: that way you can learn more about the music of Deep Purple and perhaps achieve better scores in the future. Because there will be 3200 different questions, it's not easy to memorize all the information! Also guessing is not wise, because there is a 75 % chance of hitting the wrong answer (as there are 4 answer possibilities), which gives -50 points, and only 25 % chance of hitting the correct answer by accident. So the expected score value is 75 % * -50 + 25 % * 100 = -12.5 points, which means it's not worth to guess. But sometimes you have to. =)

The next thing I'm going to work on is removing some little glitches from the quiz engine and add more features into it. Then some changes to the graphical lay-out and I think it's realistic to have the first 'real' test version out during or after the weekend. Let's wait and see. =)

How will it actually work?

Ok, some technical stuff here, but not that complicated at all.

So, DPAQ will be a downloadable Windows application at the first phase. This means you can download it like any other game or app you have downloaded onto your PC. The ~6 Mb zip file contains the executable quiz file. Double-click and it will open up! Not very hard, huh? That's how it will work in the first version of DPAQ. Later, the quiz will be playable directly in a web browser, when manual download is not needed.

Here's a preview picture of how it will look when the player has started a new game:



There you see a very basic question presented to the player: which song is playing? So, currently there is a short 10-second sound sample playing from The Purpendicular Waltz, Lick It Up, Hey Joe or Clearly Quite Absurd. If you recognize the correct song, all you have to do is to click on the correct button - as simple as that!

Technically, it will work in the following way. First, one song out of the 230-250 is randomly selected from the database, before the question type and alternative answer possibilities (3 false answers, 1 correct answer) have been chosen. After that, the application connects to the server which hosts all the short sound clips and the clip of the selected song is loaded & played by the game. When the player answers, the sound sample stops, the memory is reseted (the loaded sample gets deleted) and a new question will be presented. If the player answers correctly, he or she will get points based on the time used in answering. The faster you are, the better score you'll get. When a false answer is entered, some minus points are given.

After the player has completed all the required questions (some 30 in one game, total question number included in the quiz is over 3,000), he or she has a possibility to submit the final score into a global online highscore database. Sounds difficult, but it's not! With only one simple button click, the game connects to a database and sends the data (player's chosen nickname and the final score). It takes some 5 seconds and voilà - the score has been submitted and every player around the world can see the result in their applications. Thus, some little playful "competing" can occur between Deep Purple fans wordwide.

What's imporant, is that DPAQ will be 100 % secure software, won't include spyware or anything like that. So it will be fun, free, easy and safe to play!

Content planning...

I'm planning to include about 230-250 DP song sound clips into the first version of the quiz. Basically this would mean short 5-10 second sound samples of virtually all of the studio material and some live material of Deep Purple. Currently in the plans are the following albums:

• Shades Of Deep Purple
• The Book Of Taliesyn
• Deep Purple
• In Rock
• Fireball
  
• Machine Head
• Who Do We Think We Are
• Burn
• Stormbringer
• Come Taste The Band
• Perfect Strangers
• The House Of The Blue Light
• Slaves & Masters
• The Battle Rages On
• Purpendicular
• Abandon
• Bananas
• Rapture Of The Deep
• Made In Japan
• Nobody's Perfect
• Total Abandon - Live In Australia '99
• Live At The Olympia '96
  

There will probably be also a possibility to select different "game modes", based on the difficulty of the questions and combination of selected albums. While the main game mode would contain all of the material with both all the basic and all the trivia questions, there could be alternative modes with e.g. just "Morse Era" or "Mk II" modes that would ask questions only related to the music released by these certain line-ups of the band. Also, some "easier" mode could be added for the new fans, that would feature only relatively well-known songs with just basic questions.

However, the main game mode would still remain as the most important, and it would be the only mode to have a global online highscore list, which will contain all the DP-fans' quiz results worldwide, updated in real time. With the online highscore list, it's possible to play the game with friends, with other fans and compare the scores.

Project is started!

Actually, it was started already couple of days ago at the Deep Purple Fan Forum, but this blogsite dedicated for the project was opened up today.

So, on the right side of the screen you'll see a brief description of what's DPAQ all about. Or will be. In these blog posts, I will keep you updated on how the project is going on and what are the plans. If you're interested in this project, it would be great if you'd post some comments to the blog and share your ideas and thoughts. You can do this by clicking the "comments"-link below this post, for example. To know that there are people who are interested in this, will keep the project alive, so it's really important. Thanks.

Currently the plan is make a quiz that would randomly select a DP song to play (a very short 5-10 second sound clip) and then a question to ask the player. After the player has completed 20-30 questions, a final score is calculated based on how well he or she recognized the songs and answered to the questions. This score can then be sent into a global highscore list, so that all the DP-fans worldwide can "compete" with each other and try to reach a good score in the game. In one word: fun :)

The target is to include a short clip of every song of DP studio material over the years, plus bonus tracks, live tracks and some rare material. In total, this could perhaps mean 250 sound clips. There would be some 12 question types, which can be diveded into two main categories: basic questions and trivia questions.

Basic questions (for example):

• Which song is currently playing?
• On which album was it originally released?
• When was it released?
• Which Deep Purple Mk recorded it?
• Which guitarist/bass player/singer was there?

Trivia questions (for example):

• Where it was recorded?
• Who produced it?
• How long is the track in minutes?
• Who wrote the song?
• Which piece of lyric fit to the song?

12 question types and 250 songs would mean that the quiz would contain a total of 3000 questions (12 x 250)! Of course the player doesn't have to answer to them all, but just to 20-30 during one game. After that, it can be re-played for as many times as one wishes. High question number increases the replayability of the quiz.

Ideas? Suggestions? Other comments? Don't hesitate to post! :)